NBA Players’ Contracts under Latest Owners’ Offer

17Nov

David Stern tried so hard to convince players to his latest offer that he even published a memo to the players with full explanation, or dare I say advertisement, of all important changes. I’ve read it and…
here’s my question: how would it really change NBA landscape?
What kind of differences would happen under those rules?
And which teams and players would be the most affected?

I didn’t want to use any semi-guessed projections how teams could look 3-4 years in the future so I’ve used actual NBA contracts. In other words, I assumed that EVERY current NBA contract was signed under new rules and I’ve changed every contract as it would have been signed under latest owners’ offer.

Obviously, it wouldn’t work that way but I think it’s a nice simulation about NBA rosters given those changes.

Here are the highlights:

[other than the fact it was a good exercise how NBA contracts work]

1) For most teams there would be only two differences

A couple of shorter by one year contracts and savings worth a couple of millions thanks to lower raises. It could make a real difference in some cases [like Joe Johnson’s] but it would have any effect in 2-to-4 years.
In all those shorter contracts and lower raises would be probably the most helpful to Magic’s roster.

2) Huge majority of bad contracts still would be signed

Obviously they would be a little less bad thanks to 1) but still if any GM wanted to overpay bench guy or pseudo-star, rules wouldn’t disallow him that opportunity.

3) The most affected teams would be

[in order of team’s city name]:

Denver Nuggets – their two rotation players [Harrington and Andersen] would either earn a lot less money or they would have to sign somewhere else. Also there’s a sizeable chance they would still have Carmelo.

LA Lakers – their core of Kobe, Gasol, Odom, Bynum would be the same but they would have to find some cheaper alternatives to play at PG and SF. Or players whom they signed [Artest, Blake, Barnes] would have to agree to significantly lower salaries.

Miami Heat – their window to win a championship would be 2 years shorter!
That’s because of a change regarding sign-and-trades rules.

New Orleans Hornets, New Jersey Nets, Orlando Magic – the same issue for all three of them:
thanks to a little tweak regarding player’s options either Dwight, Deron and Paul would sign shorter extensions or they wouldn’t be free agents until 2013.

New York Knicks – with Extension-and-trade prohibited Carmelo saga would look very differently.
Either he would have to wait until late August to sign his extension or trade with Nuggets wouldn’t happen and he would have to sign as a free agent.

Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs – surprising amount of players would either earn a lot less money or they would have to sign somewhere else or in a different way than they did.

Washington Wizards – they would have a huge amount of cap space thanks to Rashard Lewis’ shorter contract. But there would also be a bad news about it: they would have to spend almost 30M$ to even reach new required minimum salary for a team!

So pretty much only stars who wanted to change teams and a middle class. All of them would either earn a lot less money or they would have to sign somewhere else or would have to sign in a different way than they did.

You can check and examine all the numbers below… although please keep in mind that:

I’ve used numbers from www.storytellerscontracts.com as a baseline so all marks are the same:
(name) means free agent while [name] = rookie. You can find original file here,

I didn’t even try to fill out rosters so some of them looks empty,

I ignored most of the free agents [I included some of them just for fun and to show some new contracts],

“-PO” means that player wouldn’t have his player option.

And now a very, very long table with all NBA players’ salaries had they been signed under latest owners’ offer.